Road accidents have emerged as a major global problem in the last five decades. The annual accident statistics reveal that more than 500,000 persons are killed and 15 million persons are injured every year in road accidents over the world. However, from available figures, about 70 percent of the fatalities occur in the developing countries of the world. In 1995, China, India and Brazil alone had over 150,000 road accident fatalities which is nearly half of the total world fatalities. The cost of road accidents is very high and can significantly affect the economies of many developing countries. It has been estimated that the cost of road accidents may be about 2% of the GDP of most countries. Urbanisation is growing at a rapid pace in the developed countries and more so in the developing countries due to industrialisation and rural-urban migration. India itself is expected to have at least forty cities having over a million population by the end of this century. In this context, a study of urban road safety was considered necessary to understand the dynamics of this phenomenon as more and more urban areas will encounter this growing problem in future. Bangalore, the capital city of Kamataka State of India, is considered as the 5th metropolitan city of the country after Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. The agglomeration of Bangalore has a population of nearly five million and this growth rate has far exceeded those of other cities; it being rated as the fastest growing city in entire Asia during the 70's. Not surprisingly, the vehicle population in Bangalore city has also been growing at a phenomenal rate; viz: over the twenty year period from 1976 to 1996, the number of registered vehicles has risen by over 680 per cent. The Bangalore City Traffic Police adopted the Microcomputer Accident Analysis Package (AAP) with the cooperation of the Transport Research Laboratory, U.K.With considerable police effort, including the production of eighty road maps with a nodal coding system and the back-coding of accident data since 1990, there are now about 40,000 accidents recorded on the computer database. Bangalore City can be credited with being the first city in the entire country to have systematically computerised the accident data on such a scale. This report focuses on a macro analysis of this accident database as well as a micro analysis. The latter includes a study of serious accident blackspots spread over about 1/5th of the city area which were visited, surveyed and the accident causation analysed. As well as the accident data, data on several other aspects of the city that impinge on the road safety processes have been collected during the course of the study. Data on traffic flows have been collected by the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Data on enforcement by the Traffic Police in Bangalore city have been collected and collated for the study period i.e 1990 to 1994 including information on the number and types of violations booked on the spot and referred to the courts. An analysis of these data throws light on the direction and content of Police enforcement and the inadequacies therein in the context of road safety. An attempt has been made to develop mathematical models to analyse accident concentration at accident blackspots taking into consideration many of the factors that might contribute to crashes. The main components of the study are thus as follows: (i) a macro analysis of the accidents to discern the trends and patterns; (ii) a micro analysis of accident blackspots to appreciate the site problems, diagnose the accident causes and suggest countermeasures; (iii) an accident causation analysis to identify and classify factors based on a survey of about I 00 accident blackspots; and (iv) simple accident models have been developed calculating partial coefficients of safety for Bangalore's roads. These different analyses have given an insight into the accident problem in Bangalore city. The broad conclusions that can be drawn from this study are as follows: 1. Vehicles and accidents are growing at a phenomenal rate, 2. Night-time accidents constitute a high proportion of accidents, particularly on Sundays, 3. Accident occurrence varies between 20 to 40 every day with an average of about 25 per day, 4. Links show higher accident rates compared with nodes, 5. Sparsely inhabited areas of the city, ie the outskirts, pose a serious safety problem with higher fatality rates, 6. Goods and public passenger vehicles are involved in a considerable number of fatal accidents, 7. Pedestrians and two-wheeler riders are proportionally more involved in accidents compared with other casualty classes, 8. The most productive age group, ie 21 to 35 years of age, have high accident involvement, 9. Accidents have a strong tendency to cluster around certain sites, 10. Roads, regulation, land use, road user behaviour and traffic characteristics constitute the most important accident causative factor groups, as demonstrated in an analysis of the prominent blackspots, 11. Accident models developed indicate carriageway width, median, footpath width, gradient, deflection angle, sight distance and traffic volumes are important crash related factors, and 12. There is an urgent need for designing policies and time-bound programmes to deal with the urban road safety problems as the one faced in Bangalore city. The above are some of the prominent conclusions that can be drawn from this study which has been based largely on MAAP accident data. The list is not exhaustive but only indicative. The study shows that the accident problem is essentially intelligible and hence should, in theory, be remediable. (A)
Abstract